We say in the article below about the collapse of the Christmas savings club Farepak that the administrators had already charged £2.7m. The administrators' fees amount to about £633,000 of that total; the rest is payments made as part of the administration.

Christmas is coming, again. Catalogues the size of telephone books weigh down posties with promises of useless gifts for those who have everything. For those with minus nothing, the season of unbearable debt begins here. Hardest is the fate of Farepak savers, who lost their money when the £38m Christmas hamper and voucher company went bust in 2006. About 150,000 low-income savers lost an average of £400; some of them lost up to £2,000. There were families in which everyone lost: one grandmother collected £10,000 from her four daughters, three daughters-in-law and hosts of other relatives, so no one had anything to give or lend anyone else.

The crash led many Farepak people into running up debts they had striven so hard to avoid. A report from Kings College London, Unison and Birmingham University later this week will show the harm done to victims. So far they have only had a little help from an emergency fund: some MPs gave up a day's wages. But financial institutions showed Scrooge-like ungenerosity: couldn't they raise £38m in the year the City earned £8bn bonuses? So much for their boasts about philanthropy.

Administrators have already charged £2.7m, and Farepak's victims have been told to expect only 5p in the pound of their savings back. That's an average of £20 for a £400 loss, and won't come for months yet. A report is expected in the new year about who was to blame. A flicker of hope in some headlines last month suggested Gordon Brown was promising a rescue: "Brown promises justice for Farepak victims." But there's nothing of the sort. When asked in the Commons, he merely agreed to meet MPs and called the affair "completely unacceptable" - which of course it is.

Not surprisingly, the Farepak victims compare their fate with the instant pay-out for Northern Rock savers. How come £18bn or more was punted up pronto when politicians and bankers saw middle England savers queuing outside bank branches - yet there was no mere £38m for Farepak? These victims were silent, poor and scattered, with nowhere to queue for the cameras. Their misfortune was that their crash didn't threaten the banking system. Also, their uneconomic saving habits made them people from another financial planet to the opinion formers who made a huge fuss over Equitable Life and Northern Rock. Louise McDade, chair of the campaign, says: "In hindsight, how could we have been so daft? Well, we wouldn't have been if we'd know it wasn't regulated."

True, the Northern Rock £18bn rescue fund is not taxpayers' money lost: the government will almost certainly end up with a profit, not a loss, as the bank's mortgage debts are solid. The subprime savers are the wretched Farepak people who were not even borrowing money, only saving for zero interest. How can a company fail when all it did was take in poor people's money for a whole year, pay them no interest, in exchange for an above-high street-priced catalogue of goods at Christmas time? There was no credit or interest offered, only a "safe" place for cash. Families living on the edge want to put Christmas money out of reach. Why ordinary banks aren't offering the same fixed-date deal, with no or low interest, is a mystery.

The government feared bailing out Farepak savers would be a dangerous precedent. What of the £1.7m lost to Brick Lane Bengalis this summer, when First Solution Money Transfer collapsed? It was much smaller, but 2,000 very poor people saving £5 a week to send to families back home lost painfully large sums.

No government will give a blank cheque against every failed enterprise, but the difference was in the instant reaction to Northern Rock. Overnight all bank savers got a cast-iron £35,000 guaranteed - a sum unimaginable to Farepak or First Solution savers. So why not them? Why was there no immediate change in the law to protect low-income savers? The remaining Christmas hamper companies have now ring-fenced savers' cash - but if they hadn't, they'd have gone bust at once.

In the 10 years since Labour came to power promising to start a people's bank to give modest access to credit to those in most need, nothing has been done. Basic bank accounts now receive benefits, pensions and wages, but they offer no credit, not the smallest overdraft facility. One penny overdrawn precipitates a £30 penalty: that could be half a week's disposable income. Why did the government not oblige banks to offer a reasonable credit deal?

The state's Social Fund does give out crisis loans without interest, but only if there is money in the fund. It is clawed back very fast from benefits, leaving families desperate. A challenge fund of £35m does now back local cooperative credit unions, whose savings are now guaranteed. Credit unions are idealistic community enterprises, but they are not always ideal, some only opening one day a week in a church hall: 28 have collapsed in six years, eight in the last six months. People on low incomes need ordinary bank accounts with easy access via cash machines, and a credit facility at a fair interest, like everyone else.

Pilots for a Savings Gateway, where the government offered as much as £1 for every £1 low-income families saved, had mixed results. But Carl Emmerson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which evaluated the results, concludes it might not be worthwhile: the better-off simply moved their existing savings into the Gateway to earn extra, while the poorest just don't have money to save. He says it would be better simply to give people extra money in tax credits. Poverty is their problem: most are relatively prudent, or else they'd starve (benefits for a family of four total only £200 a week).

Meanwhile, on that other financial planet, the state pays out £2.5bn a year in tax relief for Peps and ISAs to well-off savers. The IFS finds no evidence that people save more: they just transfer into these tax-free savings. So why not redirect that useless subsidy to a good savings and credit system for those who really do need state help?

That's where this always returns. People on subprime pay and benefits are just too poor to save - and yet they have to borrow when minor mishaps cause financial catastrophe. So loan companies can charge what they like - check out the Provident's site for loans at 183% APR - often with worse rates door to door. Why, 10 years on, has nothing been done? And why did it take the blink of any eye, in comparison, to rescue Northern Rock savers?